iDVD as the Best Dental Marketing Tool Ever!!!

Like many dentists, I was a "PC Guy" for years. After all, my office software ran on a PC and it's just the way I was brought up. Then, one day at the mall about 5 years ago, I was walking past the Apple store and decided to stop in. I looked around and decided that I would try an experiment. I bought a cheap, bottom of the line Mac Mini and installed a virtual environment using VMWare ( I can explain this more to you if you're interested) and Windows XP. On that computer I installed the PC dental software so I could see how it could perform.

Well, it worked pretty well, with most of the shortcomings being due to the low computing power of the mini, not the overall nature of the Mac. However, having the mini allowed me to spend a lot of time playing with Mac apps. My favorite quickly became iDVD.

iDVD is ("was"-more on this below) an amazing piece of software that was originally designed to allow you to burn your movies to DVD, however, it was really very useful for marketing your practice. Imagine being able to make a professional movie that could play in your office, showing all of your cases with navigation using nothing more than a remote control.

iDVD allows one to create "chapters" of slideshows that one can see on the home screen. Like any DVD, what you burn allows a repeatable home screen like you might see on any commercial movie DVD. While this screen plays over and over, there are a variety of slideshows of your work that you can setup for one to choose. Best of all, when the shows start, music can play with them and the program will take the song you choose and make the number slides fit it perfectly. It's amazing!

Best of all, once it's burned to disk, all you need to show it is a TV with a  DVD built in. Right now, you could buy a 32" flatscreen TV with a built in DVD player for as little as $279. You can make a DVD in as little as 10 minutes and have a great way of showing off your work to everyone who comes into your office.

Below is an example of what you could make. Your patients could use the DVD remote control to pick which slideshow they want to see.

Here is an example of what the finished "Home Page" will look like while it plays on your computer in the reception area or consultation room.

All your viewer would need to do is pick which of the slideshows they would like to see.  What this blog cannot show you is how nice the screen looks on a TV. The box with the smile circles around and you can pick several picture to cycle. It also has music.

Now, imagine that for your finished cases you made a DVD to send to a patient's workplace along with a mug with your practice name and some mints/candies in it. The DVD could look something like this:

This is what a DVD to be sent to a patient can look like.

If you put nice pictures on the show, there's a pretty good chance that they'll throw it in their DVD player on their computer (can be Mac or PC or regular DVD player) and maybe show a coworker who could become a new patient...

Now, there are only three things that you need to keep in mind:

1. You must have good looking pictures to make this work well. If your images don't look great, it will be like showing a patient a filthy articulator covered in stone. At the least, you may want to consider buying our "Exceptional Clinical Photography DVD" found HERE.
2. For a few reasons, Apple stopped making iDVD this past year. Go and get a copy of iLife 11 and you'll be in great shape. That's where iDVD is found.
3. You must have a Mac to do this. Now, I love PCs as well, but there simply is NOT a program for PC that does what iDVD does as quickly and easily.

I hope this helps, and as always, you can email me with any questions or issues.

Take Care,
Glenn